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Marketing is changing because the customer is changing. Your customer is no longer interested in getting one-sided and self-congratulatory ‘my product is so good that your life is not worth a dime without it’ branding messages that talk at her rather than with her.

She is no longer impressed or convinced by your celebrity brand endorser who she knows is paid mega sums by you to paste a fake smile and tell the world that your brand is the answer to every consumer’s prayers

She is frankly irritated by your noisy, cluttering ads that waste her time and disrupt her experience.

So she simply skips your ads, advertorials, fliers and displays to leave your brand dancing in the dark.

Gone are the days of conventional one-sided, over-stimulated, over-hyped marketing that treated all audience as one homogenous group and talked en masse.

Welcome to new age marketing where buyers are bored, wary and simply mistrustful of branded content – digital or TV or print or any other – and want to be influenced through genuine people they can trust and identify with.

So what does the marketer do?

How do you get your customer to buy your brand when she is just not interested in your old and no longer gold traditional marketing messages?

You do so by switching to influencer marketing because that’s what makes her pay attention to your brand and look at it twice.

Let me explain. Your customer is so well-connected to millions of other users across the globe through social networks, blogs and more on her mobile phone.

Rather than take your brand content at face value, she now seeks third party opinions and recommendations who she believes to be more unbiased and hence, more trustworthy. This is the window of opportunity that influencer marketing uses to great results.

Remember, people trust people, not ads.

Any surprise then that traditional marketing no longer works like it used to in pre-social network era (yeah, those dark ages did exist not so long ago)! Traditional marketing is on its way out and it is getting replaced by influencer marketing.

In traditional marketing, you hire an ad agency; create big budget ad campaigns and place these in expensive media slots to catch the consumer’s eye and to promote your product. But what if your buyer, tired of incessant interruptions, simply blocks out all ads?

Yes, they are doing it more and more.

Do you know in US, ad blocking grew by 50% in 2015?

Adobe has forecast that ad blocking will grow by 41% per annum across the globe.

In other words, if you refuse to budge from traditional marketing brandwagon, the world will move ahead by tuning you out, blocking your branded content off its communication pathways, and leaving your brand high and dry.

As per The Social Media Revolution, user generated content on social media accounts for 25% search results for the global top 20 brands. In other words, one way or the other, as many as one-fourth of searches are focused on influencer marketing! That’s HUGE.

When traditional marketing ruled the roost, ad campaigns and fancy launches kept buyers informed and recalling their brands. Nowadays, people simply take out their smartphone and use Google to find products and services to fulfill their needs.

Now the higher you are in SEO rankings, the more the chance that your brand will catch your prospective buyer’s attention. It’s elementary, my dear marketer! The more your brand finds mentions on social media, the higher you will climb in Google search engine rankings.

Traditional marketing takes a dive at this point while influencer marketing gives your SEO rankings a leg up.

3) Traditional marketing is not trusted by the buyer. Influencer marketing is.

Do you know that in USA…

92%customers (more than 9 out of every 10!) put their faith in recommendations coming from others rather than in ad claims?

70% (7 out of every 10!) consumers own up to paying heed to online reviews as their second most-trusted source of product information?

47% follow blogs to stay in touch with what’s hot and what’s not.

Traditional or new age, marketing is all about winning your customer’s trust. This is where influencer marketing scores over traditional marketing spectacularly.

The reason is simple. As we stated earlier, people trust people, not ads. Traditional marketing relies on branded content which today’s customer perceives as biased and therefore, not trustworthy enough. Influencer marketing uses organic content – online reviews and recommendations – which your customer perceives as impartial and hence more reliable.

Need more proof?

A McCarthy study found out that 83% millennials dislike advertising. A McKinsey study found out that brand retention and recall went up by 37% when the recommendations came from third party sources.

A Wharton study found out that 82% (more than 8 out of every 10) consumers stated that they are more likely to make a purchase on recommendation of a influencer (low on reach but high on one-to-one engagement and conversion). Paid advertising just pales in comparison

4) Influencer marketing packs in more bang for every buck you spend.

Traditional marketing costs more, delivers less.

As per influencer marketplace Tomoson’s latest poll report, Influencer marketing is yielding $6.5 in revenue for every $1 put into it on average. 7 out of every 10 businesses using influencer marketing earn $2 for every single dollar spent. 13% businesses actually earned $20 for every single dollar spent.

This is massive return on investment (ROI) your brand can’t afford to miss out on. In case you are interested, this study also found out that influencer marketing is growing at a phenomenally high pace leaving other strategies such as affiliate marketing or paid searches or paid advertising lagging far behind.

Unfortunately, today’s consumers may just block out ads and dismiss celebrity endorsers as ‘paid to speak for the brand’, taking the wind out of your marketing plan.

On the other hand, influencer marketing can deliver superior results for far less by focusing on real-life micro- and middle-influencers that have a limited but loyal following that your buyers identify with, listen to and rely on for advice.

Need more convincing that influencer marketing scores over traditional marketing?

Chew on this. Traditional marketing requires a substantial budget right from the start. Influencer marketing is scalable as well. You can grow it as your brand grows. Begin with a few influencers and as your sales and targets grow, just expand the orbit to bring in more influencers.

The traditional marketing behemoth with its conventional strategies, slow pace and limited sphere of influence can’t compete with this widespread, multi-target guerilla force that influencer marketing packs in so naturally.

Traditional marketing with its conventional promotional models relies on print and electronic media to catch attention of their target audiences. More and more people (especially millennials and younger) shun print and electronic media and prefer the digital realms of blogs, social media and online forums.

Influencer marketing, on the other hand, reaches these ‘unreachables’ very nimbly by permeating their personal networks with well-placed influencers they are responsive to. Think of it, with only traditional marketing tools, you would lose out on this very crucial market segment that’s prefers to stay out of conventional media’s reach.

In contrast, influencer marketing is totally targetable as well as trackable. In digital domains, you can reach out to targeted groups and actually track each view, each like to measure your brand’s impact.

Summary

No two ways about it, traditional marketing is getting beaten by influencer marketing across the board. Traditional marketing is losing steam and influencer marketing is gaining pace.

Traditional marketing can no longer be the mainstay of your branding, not if you wish to engage consumers and persuade them to try out your brand. To stay in the race, you need to give the heave ho to outdated traditional marketing and embrace influencer marketing.

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